Environments I. The retrofit of suburbia; C. The residential pod

Of all the ways of developing land that prevail today in America, the housing pod is probably the most pervasive. The unintended consequence of a post-World War II policy of mass housing production on “efficient” cleared sites is this: the American Dream of owning a single-family detached house has become enveloped by a system that produces technically, financially, socially, and physically isolating monocultures. The traditional American Dream regarded the individual house as the necessary home base of participatory democracy. In contrast, houses are now delivered in market-segmented, wholly residential pods whose basic conception, configuration, and operation discourage awareness and engagement outside precise, narrow limits. Fifty years after the postwar pod housing system began to achieve consistency and pervasiveness, the flaws are clear enough. Market, aesthetic, and construction considerations intertwine; a single house’s technical or aesthetic failures, while merely a blight or a joke in a variegated community built over time, become a cataclysm in a pod monoculture where all houses are failing or “outtadate” because of shared flaws. Default setting Greenfield podiform development continues for now as suburbia’s default setting. A powerful combination of environmentalist resistance and demographic trends seems fated to end its dominance. But in the meantime the aging pods of the 1950s and 1960s slouch towards becoming slums. Because they are in increasingly evident crisis, they are more and more open to change. Opportunities for retrofitting first generation pods will become more common. It is time to rehearse the methods. Places in which older, smaller, relatively affordable pod housing is being displaced by McMansions are not the most interesting opportunity. It lies instead in developments where values have been damaged by obsolescence or fashion. Managing the former situations so that older units remain amongst new McMansions to form a mixed-income neighborhood is a matter of political will; altering the latter to recover market attractiveness is a matter of evolving techniques for physical alteration. In essence there are just three things to do to pods. First, increase the number and variety of pedestrian and vehicular connections. Second, add elements that augment diversity of use and type. Third, allow houses to be updated to current higher and more complicated standards. All these break the monoculture — crumbling and enriching “cookie-cutter development.” Among techniques for increasing connectivity, two are particularly effective. Connecting some cul-de-sacs through to close-by streets, both within and outside a pod, affords dramatic transformation of character and function. Also useful is introducing cross streets or passages to interrupt too-long runs of street. In both techniques a few existing lots and houses are sacrificed to the general benefit. The ideal is to increase overall value and diversity by finding situations in which the sacrificed areas allow replacement with new lots, perhaps for different house types, fronting the new connection streets. Wherever a residential pod lies adjacent to a major thoroughfare, the least valuable houses are usually those backing onto the thoroughfare, particularly those near the single entrance into the pod’s internal roads. Dramatic change can be effected in such areas by substituting building types that thrive, not suffer, near roads. Commercial and live-work units have precisely that affinity. Both make use of the roads while buffering the pod houses behind and provide a neighborhood center as well. Within a pod, a neighborhood green can be created by transforming a cluster of lots into open space, and selectively subdividing some of the surrounding lots. The result is a new ensemble with more mixed-size lots. Because the green increases the value of enfronting properties, the aggregate value rises. u